


The New Kid

by BlindtoDreams



Category: Glee
Genre: Fluff, Fluff and Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-04
Updated: 2012-05-04
Packaged: 2017-11-04 20:15:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/397790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlindtoDreams/pseuds/BlindtoDreams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The morning of Blaine's first McKinley Monday is full of uncertainties.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The New Kid

**Author's Note:**

> A shameless puddle of fluff inspired by the news that Blaine would be transferring schools - clearly written before the new season began.

He couldn’t have guessed at gunpoint who’d be waiting for him when he answered the door that morning. It was 6:57, he’d been awake for less than ten minutes, and the confused space following a full night’s sleep was as close as Kurt ever came to total vulnerability. His mind was empty of all thought besides “bothered” and “hungry.”  

With eyes pinched against the assault of the hallway sconces and one hand absently stroking at the mess he knew his hair was, Kurt opened the front door, peered out into the pale, growing morning. 

Blaine’s face distinguished itself from everything else at a snail’s pace. His eyes were on his feet and he’d put both hands in his pockets after knocking - a clear indication of discomfort. Kurt knew the gesture. 

“What are you doing here?,” he asked, lacking in sensitivity. His voice was still stiff and monotonous. 

Blaine tried to make eye contact, but the brief glance he managed danced right back down again, looking for something non-confrontational to settle on. 

“I uhm.” Nervous breath knocked out of him - he tried to laugh at himself and failed. When he finally found the words, his eyes were shining and his voice was weak. “I can’t wear my uniform to school today.”

It took a moment for Kurt to decipher the raw little nugget of truth behind what Blaine was saying. He’d never known him to worry much about how he dressed, and even if he did, to come all this way at such an ungodly hour was an extreme response to a wardrobe malfunction. His expression was tight with tired confusion. 

“I don’t—,” he began, but it died there, unfinished. Blaine forced his gaze up, held it there and focused, and Kurt knew all at once that fashion was the least of his worries. 

He found the sleeve of Blaine’s jacket between his fingers and tugged, beckoning him inside, then collected him into a quick, rumpled embrace. “Come on.” 

~

By the time Blaine shrugged off his overcoat and set it neatly across the foot of Kurt’s bed, Kurt had stirred from the weary, dry-eyed state of waking and stretched into himself - enough, at least, to be a little more accommodating to a man in crisis. 

He held Blaine by the arms and sat him on the bed’s corner, falling in beside him and moving his fingers in slow, soothing circles. 

Blaine’s evasiveness on the subject of leaving Dalton, which he’d been perfecting for most of the summer, wasn’t half as hardy a mask as he’d hoped. Kurt knew defensive confidence when he saw it. He hadn’t pushed, though, and never patronized. He let Blaine believe what he needed to believe in order to make the move comfortably. 

After a while, he’d even bought in, bit by bit, to the fantasy Blaine carved of himself, a determined performer ready to meet every situation with cheerful optimism. Staring down the barrel of his first Monday morning back in public school, however, Blaine’s nerves were visibly shot, and it was clear how badly he’d miscalculated the resurfacing of those unhappy shadows. He’d turned that Dalton uniform into a superhero’s costume, and without it, he was only Clark Kent, Peter Parker, Bruce Wayne - a troubled boy trying to hide from his history in grown-up disguises. 

“I’m sorry to just show up, I should have called.” His hands were all motion, a restless wringing. He couldn’t stand to be an inconvenience, but sometimes Kurt was the only thing that could soften unpleasant thoughts. It was a losing position. “Did I wake the whole house?” 

Kurt’s reassurance was instant and strict. “Dad’s in the shower already, and it’d take more than a doorbell to wake Finn up. Don’t worry about them. Talk to me.” 

Blaine laughed again, just as falsely, trying to put a smile on his face that he could veil himself with when he explained, “I don’t know what happened. I got up this morning and I was fine, even excited, a little. I went to my closet, looked at what I had and just. I don’t know. I haven’t had to do that in years. It’s been top right drawer, pants, top left drawer, shirts, blazer on its hook, Dalton-approved. The closet is for weekends. It’s _always_ been for weekends. What am I doing, going to the closet on a school day?” 

He stalled, there, exhuming old demons and choking on the knowledge that he had only an hour left before he’d need to fight them again. Kurt slid his palm across the back of Blaine’s neck and squeezed, kneading out the tension, encouraging him to continue, but said nothing. 

When he confessed his worry, already obvious, it was in a bleak, miserable mockery of his own voice, shamed by its perceived weakness. 

“I don’t know if I can do this, Kurt.” 

They both knew it was too late to change his mind, but the physical certainty of having switched schools wasn’t what he feared failing at. It was _managing_ at that new school, day after day, without a safety net. What could Kurt say to that kind of a loss? He and Blaine had suffered similar troubles at the hands of similar people, but in such varied extremes. He was powerless - motivated and desperate to help, but powerless. 

Powerlessness did not pardon him from effort. It hadn’t stopped Blaine, in the past. Kurt recognized the opportunity he was being given to repay some of the kindness he’d found at Dalton, not because he was dating the sullen boy on the corner of his bed who so badly needed it, but simply _because_ he so badly needed it.  


Kurt lifted his head, then, spine in a proud, rigid column.

“It’s a good thing you came to me, then. Because I _do_ know. I know how strong you are - you were strong enough to get me through a hard time, right? When we didn’t even know each other.” 

Blaine was unmoved, though he tried his damnedest to conceal it with a lopsided grin. “That was different, Kurt. It’s - I’m good at supportive. This isn’t the same.”  


“I know. I know it won’t be easy, but … maybe it isn’t _supposed_ to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“I _mean_ ,” he stressed, tone turning unintentionally sharp with determination, “the whole point of you coming to McKinley is to face up to something you regret, to prove to yourself that you can. If it were an easy thing to do, you wouldn’t have anything to prove in the first place.” 

The skill Kurt had for argument told him he was near to an irrefutable point when Blaine couldn’t form a response, so he pressed, trying to reign in the sting of his voice.  


“Maybe you just have to be scared for a little while, Blaine. And maybe that’s exactly how you’re supposed to feel. But that doesn’t mean you can’t handle it.”

“You think I can.” It wasn’t a question - merely an adjustment to the weight of someone believing in him.  


“I know you can,” he answered, momentarily tender in the exchange. 

It lasted only a fraction of a second, though, long enough to see Blaine’s mouth crease into a smile. 

Success altered his demeanor. Suddenly he was intense, excited, and full of his sophisticated breed of mischief. 

“More importantly, I know how to make it look like _you_ know you can. Get up.” 

Blaine resisted, left behind in the swing of Kurt’s mood and not quite ready to leave the comfort of their private moment. “Why?” 

It was already after 7:00. With two men to dress, Kurt was willing to stall no longer at insecurity. If Blaine was going to get through this, one way or the other, it would be with action, with confrontation, not with talk.  


“You’re certainly not going to school in your pajamas, not on your first day walking those halls with _me_. I’ll find you something to wear.” 

His outstretched hand left no room for further discussion, and Blaine let himself be led to the closet, protesting in jest, “I don’t think anything of yours is going to fit me.” 

“I own capris,” was the matter-of-fact reply. 

In spite of himself, Blaine felt the frenzy of his affections stir awake at Kurt’s demand, at his challenge, and he was happier, a second at a time, trailing behind. _No_ , he thought contentedly to the suggestion, _no, you will not put me in capris. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it._

As it happened, capris were not the order of the day, but Blaine barely registered what he’d been  pinched, prodded and stuffed into when all was said and done. 

The fifteen minutes he spent as Kurt’s mannequin (having ties fastened around his neck and then discarded, shirts pulled over and off of his shoulders and pants ordered onto him that Kurt would then tug at, adjust and be gravely dissatisfied by), served both as a distraction from his worries and an unexpected reason to overcome them; he couldn’t remember when they’d come to such a point of comfort. Kurt addressed him with playful, salacious, uncharacteristic little nicknames when he ordered him out of garments, sure enough, and the twist of excitement at being close to the man he loved, half-dressed, was difficult to ignore, but it was all secondary. 

It was secondary to the way Kurt’s brow would rumple when he stopped flirting and went to work, trying to pin up a pair of slacks that dragged Blaine’s ankles. He’d never seen him work so dutifully at anything. 

It was secondary to the sight of Kurt in an undershirt and boxers, inelegant and domestic, as he would be if they already shared a home, shared a bedroom, shared a life. 

It was secondary, most importantly, to what Kurt was _not_ doing. He’d go to school with unwashed hair and his shirt ironed in a rush, for instance, because he’d given up his morning’s routine for Blaine. 

He didn’t have to say so, either. Blaine knew Kurt’s ritualistic methods of beginning the day, both by his own admission and by Finn’s exaggerated retelling. He understood what comforts were being sacrificed for his own. That Kurt expected no praise for them, that he didn’t so much as mention them, it spotlighted a shift in their dynamic he hadn’t taken notice of, before.  Feeling that way, as though he’d been _knighted_ by a person’s love, it made the baser thrills of skin on skin less prominent. 

Blaine ended the morning in a pair of charcoal pants that Kurt was too tall for and a merlot-colored top, as comfortable on him as anything was going to be. He dressed when Kurt left the room, both to hurry his way into an outfit and to explain Blaine’s inevitable presence at breakfast. It was his first moment of solitude since the drive over.

The panic that motivated him to Kurt’s house,  in faded pajama pants and an oversized t-shirt, had subsided to a nervous little throb, by now. He turned twice in the mirror to see if anything looked out of place, and for a minute, forgot what he _should’ve_ been wearing today. His face was the same, and his smile, and his build. He believed in the same things and he read the same books and he knew the same facts - he was still Dalton’s Blaine, but he was Blaine without Dalton.   


One last look in the mirror prompted a deep breath, a soft laugh, and a familiar phrase muttered at his reflection. “Don’t forget your jacket, new kid. You’ll fit right in.” 

~

Remembering unhappy things was a challenge in the Hummel/Hudson house. Finn talked much more than Blaine expected him to. Did he always begin the day like that, energetic and full of still-forming thoughts? Or was it the result of having another voice at the table?  


Burt and Carole, too, asked him questions as they ate - neutral, but not impersonal - and Kurt, who’d pulled his exterior personality on with his clothes, was exactly who he would have to be until 3:00pm; quick-tongued and full of barbs for those around him (including Blaine, who was ribbed twice about the stature of his legs). 

The family dynamic, loud and loving, flushed him clean of dread from the moment he was greeted by their cheerful good mornings to the departure they all made from one another after stacking dishes in the kitchen sink. It surprised him when they were alone again, collecting Kurt’s books and pulling their jackets on near the front door, that uneasiness could find him here, could threaten to take him back under. 

“Oh, no. I don’t think so,” Kurt dictated from the hall closet, interrupting the creep of Blaine’s concern. “You’re not putting that polyester nightmare over all the work I’ve done to make you look presentable.” 

Blaine faked a pout. “I thought you liked my coat.” 

“Not with that top, I don’t. I’ll lend you one.” 

He abandoned his jacket to the back of an armchair, obliviously docile in his nervousness at how close they were to leaving. He wanted so badly to conceal it. They’d worked tirelessly to make him comfortable, today. “You’re determined to get me to school wearing nothing I actually own, aren’t you?” 

Kurt was already slinging a softer, heavier garment around Blaine’s shoulders, tucking in panels and adjusting the collar, by the time he answered lowly, with fallen, focused eyes, “And I’ll demand every last scrap of it back, at the end of the day.” 

Blaine's natural talent for flirtation failed him. He smiled,  but it was strained and uncertain.  He didn’t know when he’d started holding his breath, or when he’d let his eyes fall shut, trying to summon courage through concentration, but Kurt must have picked up on the change. His voice broke that ill-advised meditation, a relapse toward internalizing. 

“Blaine. Look at me.” 

He was quick to answer the command, lifting his face to the steady eye Kurt fixed him with. A beat of silence passed between them, and Kurt’s thumb flicked up from the dark spread of fabric to slide along Blaine’s jaw, reassuring. 

“You look amazing. You _are_ amazing. And it has nothing to do with the clothes.” He sealed his confidences with a kiss, dropped warm and firm at the corner of Blaine’s mouth, and let his hands linger at the coat’s lapels before he pulled away. 

The door swung open and light snuck in, the sun fat and heavy in the sky. It looked like a different day entirely.  “Ready?” 

Once again, he’d been left behind on one of the tiny, forgotten islands of Kurt’s unexpected tenderness, struggling to catch up.  This was the feeling he needed to hold onto, this special, intimate thing, this allowance he’d been given to see behind the curtain. There were no more walls to cower behind, no more costumes to wear, no other avenues back into himself where he could hide when he didn’t want to face a problem. 

Now, there was something better - there was someone on his _side_. He could see that, touch it, count on it and be counted on in turn. It was better. This was _going to be_ better. 

"Ready."


End file.
